Wednesday, August 18, 2010

If you are one who claims a personal relationship with a guy who calls himself Jesus, or Christ, you might want to skip over this. I dislike this Jesus, whoever and whatever he says he is. I'm biased, prejudiced and unfair. I wonder why?

Think of me as you relax. A truly spiritual experience.

A letter from Jesus, transcribed from a wall hanging:

Dear Friend,

I love you very much and care about you. I saw you yesterday as you were walking with your friends. I called to you. I wanted to talk to you and I waited, but you did not answer me. Still, as evening drew near, I gave you a sunset to close your day and a cool breeze to rest you.

I saw you fall asleep last night and I wanted to touch your brow. So, I spilled moonlight on your pillow and your face. I have so many gifts for you, but you awakened late this morning and rushed off to work. Will you call me? Seek me? My tears were in the rain.

Why, oh why, does Dave not call me and ask me out?

Today you looked so sad, so all alone. I understand. My friends let me down many times, too. Oh, I love you; if you would only listen to me. I really love you. I show you in blue skys [sic] and in the quiet green grass; I whisper it in the leaves on the trees and breathe it in the colors of flowers; I shout it in the mountain streams and clothe you in warm sunshine. My love for you is deeper than the oceans and bigger than the biggest want or need of your heart.

If only you knew how much I – and my Father – want to help you. I’ll keep saying this to you. Come to me! Don’t forget that I am near. I have so much to share with you. I’ll wait because I love you, but it’s up to you.

Your friend,

Jesus

I'm a totally sympathetic guy, you know.

My inevitable reply:

Mr. Jesus H. Christ
Of No Fixed Address

Dear Mr. Christ:

I enjoin you immediately to forthwith cease and desist your stalking and surveillance with regard to me and all those close to me. I have notified the police and sent a copy of your letter to my lawyer.

I'm not a weirdo. Just whip me lightly.

Although you have no recent criminal record and are not listed in the national Sex Offender database, I am concerned that your attentions to me, a perfect stranger to you, are pathological. I warn you that in addition to the protections of the law, I can bring to bear significant self-defense capabilities, both physical, and, more important, psychological.

So, maybe I'm a little off-center. The two fingers? Enigmatic, eh?

To wit: I am well aware that I am not addressing an individual entity, either natural or supernatural, nor indeed the vast group of your surrogates who actually composed and circulated your execrable missive; I am addressing a meme, a mere collection of self-perpetuating ideas and emotions, and in doing so I am in all ways simply acting metaphorically. I realize that you cannot hear me any more than any other inanimate object, which makes my reply a little weird, a little silly. But not as silly and weird as the stuff you've spewed forth in this letter.

Yeah, I'm feeling a little run down...

Inside, I'm in ecstasy! Cool, huh?

My first objection is that you are deliberately placing me in the role of a child, to your wise and forgiving parent. You are addressing everyone; clearly you think that all people on this earth are children and unworthy of adulthood and self-governance. You arrogate to yourself full consciousness, moral choice, intellectual strength and emotional balance, while denying it to us, your “children”. In return for our perpetual servitude as your imperfect little darlings, you will give us mucho ice cream: endless love, a beautiful and supportive eden to live in, and plenty of bogus guilt to wallow in, to give our lives a false drama, a story to fill the emptiness in our idle minds. And all this in the context of your howlingly smarmy assertion that you have endowed us with free will, so that our choice of good over evil, or vice versa, will have actual meaning.

Hey, I'm wise and forgiving! Come back here!

Having tried your best to establish this false recreation of the nuclear family, with yourself in the role of the Feel-Good Parent and your so-called Father, Jehovah, Creator of this, that and every other thing we see, in the role of the Stern Parent, dispenser of Wisdom, Justice and Pain (while still saying every chance he gets, how much he really, really loves us, each and every one individually, “for ourselves”) you then use this situation to ratchet up the emotional manipulation. “My tears are in the rain.” ?! Puuuh-lease! This works on children and those who never really grew out of childhood’s emotional universe, which group unfortunately constitutes the majority of us. But not me!

Come and sit on my knee. Be a kid again. Don't worry, be happy.

Millions of people have come to the realization, either gradually or suddenly, that they are individuals – whole, complete, functioning autonomously, and able to apprehend a sufficiently large context such that this emotional manipulation, the dishonest currency of the memes, is visible and can be rejected.

So, Jesus: who are you, exactly? You can be anything to anybody - whatever we want. You can be our manly drinking buddy, always getting our backs:

Let's go get a beer!

Or you could be a hip, handsome young boyfriend:

Cmon, babe! Let's go skinny-dipping!

But I remember you like this: inhuman, deadly, crushed, stabbed, beaten, feeling sorry for yourself, and demanding we look at you forever, and share your pointless martyred agony/ecstasy:

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He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.